Daisy Patton is a multi-disciplinary artist born in Los Angeles, CA to a white mother from the American South and an Iranian father she never met. She spent her childhood between California and Oklahoma, affected by these conflicting cultural landscapes and absences within her family. Influenced by collective and political histories, Patton explores storytelling, social conventions of families, and living memory. Her work examines in-between spaces and identities, including the fallibility of the body and complexities of relationship.
Based in western Massachusetts, Patton has exhibited nationally, including a solo at the CU Art Museum in Boulder, the Chautauqua Institution and the Fulginitti Pavilion at Anschutz Medical Campus, as well as group shows with Spring/Break NYC, Tampa Museum of Art, Katonah Museum of Art, The Delaware Contemporary, International Museum of Science and Art, among others. She has paintings in public/private collections such as Denver Art Museum, Tampa Museum of Art, Seattle University, Fidelity Investments, among others. Patton’s work has been featured in Hyperallergic, The Jealous Curator, Transition Magazine, The Denver Post, The Chautauquan Daily, and more. Minerva Projects Press published Broken Time Machines: Daisy Patton, a book on Patton’s practice spring 2021.
Patton has completed artist residencies at Anderson Ranch, Studios at MASS MoCA, RedLine Denver, Minerva Projects, and Eastside International in Los Angeles. She has been awarded a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant, a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant, an Assets for Artists Massachusetts Matched Savings grant, a Montage Travel Award from SMFA for research in Dresden, Germany, and longlisted for the Aesthetica Prize 2022. She earned her MFA from SMFA/Tufts University, a multi-disciplinary program, and has a BFA from the University of Oklahoma with minors in History and Art History and an Honors degree. K Contemporary represents Patton in Denver, CO, and Foto Relevance represents her in Houston, TX.
Based in western Massachusetts, Patton has exhibited nationally, including a solo at the CU Art Museum in Boulder, the Chautauqua Institution and the Fulginitti Pavilion at Anschutz Medical Campus, as well as group shows with Spring/Break NYC, Tampa Museum of Art, Katonah Museum of Art, The Delaware Contemporary, International Museum of Science and Art, among others. She has paintings in public/private collections such as Denver Art Museum, Tampa Museum of Art, Seattle University, Fidelity Investments, among others. Patton’s work has been featured in Hyperallergic, The Jealous Curator, Transition Magazine, The Denver Post, The Chautauquan Daily, and more. Minerva Projects Press published Broken Time Machines: Daisy Patton, a book on Patton’s practice spring 2021.
Patton has completed artist residencies at Anderson Ranch, Studios at MASS MoCA, RedLine Denver, Minerva Projects, and Eastside International in Los Angeles. She has been awarded a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant, a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant, an Assets for Artists Massachusetts Matched Savings grant, a Montage Travel Award from SMFA for research in Dresden, Germany, and longlisted for the Aesthetica Prize 2022. She earned her MFA from SMFA/Tufts University, a multi-disciplinary program, and has a BFA from the University of Oklahoma with minors in History and Art History and an Honors degree. K Contemporary represents Patton in Denver, CO, and Foto Relevance represents her in Houston, TX.
Published on March 19th, 2023. Artist responses collected in months previous.
What are you fascinated with right now?
After feeling pretty stagnated for a couple of years, I am finally digging into making visual the altars/portals my work has been leading me to. I've been collecting found mirror frames, entryway hall trees, pediments, bed headboards, and other objects that would lend themselves to transforming into something more sacred. It is a lot of work rehabbing them and prepping them to be painted, much less the labor for that. I have done a few smaller experiments so far and am very excited, and I am hoping in the next few months to see how they function in my larger work, which is how I've typically worked.
What advice would you give your younger artist self?
I'm not sure how to answer this question anymore because of just how much of a rollercoaster things have been lately. Part of me would nudge my younger self to take advantage of being in public, of traveling more even though I didn't have any money, of trying to network more in the area where I live because the pandemic has closed all those possibilities. But it also feels like a lot of pressure to place in expecting someone to live a full life early on because the remaining years will be isolated and limited. These are what I have been thinking about a great deal lately just because they are my life now—I've worked fast but everything I make is so time-consuming that it takes me longer to reach certain milestones than other artists, which is totally fine in usual conditions but right now...everything is more complicated.
What are your tools for creative resilience these days? Do you have any methods to stay positive when life becomes difficult and perhaps when you have limited time to create?
To be honest, this past year has been one difficult thing after another. I had neck surgery last year, a new autoimmune illness diagnosis, and then a pulmonary embolism that nearly killed me. The recovery wasn't easy, and I'm not the same as I was before all that began. Being able to make work has kept me going for so long, but with some of these challenges, I could barely move, much less paint. I've always had this drive, especially after my 2010 MS diagnosis, that I had to work faster and harder because I couldn't guarantee I would be able to in the future. And then I made the decision to expand my studio since I cannot be in public anymore, which meant limbo until it was finished. I've been holding onto the light at the end of this tunnel for well over a year now—and in the next weeks, I'll finally get to fully resume my studio practice. Dogged determination I find more effective than positivity because bad things can and do happen. I've meant to read Katherine May's "Wintering" because I'm emerging from my own winter period, and I suspect it's similar in coping through all this.
What is your dreamy vision for your creative career and art practice three years from now?
I hope the new work I've begun (altarpieces and painting installation) brings what I've been dreaming for several years. I'm excited about a new gallery partnership, Foto Relevance, which is very exciting in terms of contextualizing my practice! I hope that I won't be the only fabricator working on everything—I lost my carpenter this year, so now I am building cradles for my paintings, in addition to rehabbing wood pieces I'm working on. A studio assistant I can rely on would be great, so I can focus on what I enjoy most! I'd like to think in three years the pandemic will be managed enough to return to some kind of public life, instead of sheltering in place, but I've lost hope for now. I can't even get the healthcare I need because of this—so my dream is that at the least, COVID is taken seriously by all and that collective care is restored. It would be nice to be able to do residencies and travel again, not to mention see friends and colleagues I've missed! I miss community, though I'm not sure how to feel about being abandoned by society because I'm disabled and therefore "inconvenient," to be blunt.
How are you being kind to yourself as you look towards realizing your vision for your art career?
This is something I have always struggled with—I am not kind to myself, my expectations are too high and I push myself harder than I should because I feel I am always swimming upstream. Perhaps my answer is less a how am I doing this and more of a, I really should be focused on this! I am, however, so incredibly grateful to so many people who continue to support and champion my work, which makes it easier to feel like it's accomplishing what I hope it will. Seeing those results makes it easier to take a breath here and there. I also try to think of my career not in a linear timescale, but rather something a bit more disconnected—that it will take longer, and maybe not in the ways I will get to see, for my work to achieve what I hope it will. I've begun understanding just how much the sacred is part of my work, and that demands a disconnection from the ways I used to measure my work (and how hypercritical I've been towards myself).
What are you fascinated with right now?
After feeling pretty stagnated for a couple of years, I am finally digging into making visual the altars/portals my work has been leading me to. I've been collecting found mirror frames, entryway hall trees, pediments, bed headboards, and other objects that would lend themselves to transforming into something more sacred. It is a lot of work rehabbing them and prepping them to be painted, much less the labor for that. I have done a few smaller experiments so far and am very excited, and I am hoping in the next few months to see how they function in my larger work, which is how I've typically worked.
What advice would you give your younger artist self?
I'm not sure how to answer this question anymore because of just how much of a rollercoaster things have been lately. Part of me would nudge my younger self to take advantage of being in public, of traveling more even though I didn't have any money, of trying to network more in the area where I live because the pandemic has closed all those possibilities. But it also feels like a lot of pressure to place in expecting someone to live a full life early on because the remaining years will be isolated and limited. These are what I have been thinking about a great deal lately just because they are my life now—I've worked fast but everything I make is so time-consuming that it takes me longer to reach certain milestones than other artists, which is totally fine in usual conditions but right now...everything is more complicated.
What are your tools for creative resilience these days? Do you have any methods to stay positive when life becomes difficult and perhaps when you have limited time to create?
To be honest, this past year has been one difficult thing after another. I had neck surgery last year, a new autoimmune illness diagnosis, and then a pulmonary embolism that nearly killed me. The recovery wasn't easy, and I'm not the same as I was before all that began. Being able to make work has kept me going for so long, but with some of these challenges, I could barely move, much less paint. I've always had this drive, especially after my 2010 MS diagnosis, that I had to work faster and harder because I couldn't guarantee I would be able to in the future. And then I made the decision to expand my studio since I cannot be in public anymore, which meant limbo until it was finished. I've been holding onto the light at the end of this tunnel for well over a year now—and in the next weeks, I'll finally get to fully resume my studio practice. Dogged determination I find more effective than positivity because bad things can and do happen. I've meant to read Katherine May's "Wintering" because I'm emerging from my own winter period, and I suspect it's similar in coping through all this.
What is your dreamy vision for your creative career and art practice three years from now?
I hope the new work I've begun (altarpieces and painting installation) brings what I've been dreaming for several years. I'm excited about a new gallery partnership, Foto Relevance, which is very exciting in terms of contextualizing my practice! I hope that I won't be the only fabricator working on everything—I lost my carpenter this year, so now I am building cradles for my paintings, in addition to rehabbing wood pieces I'm working on. A studio assistant I can rely on would be great, so I can focus on what I enjoy most! I'd like to think in three years the pandemic will be managed enough to return to some kind of public life, instead of sheltering in place, but I've lost hope for now. I can't even get the healthcare I need because of this—so my dream is that at the least, COVID is taken seriously by all and that collective care is restored. It would be nice to be able to do residencies and travel again, not to mention see friends and colleagues I've missed! I miss community, though I'm not sure how to feel about being abandoned by society because I'm disabled and therefore "inconvenient," to be blunt.
How are you being kind to yourself as you look towards realizing your vision for your art career?
This is something I have always struggled with—I am not kind to myself, my expectations are too high and I push myself harder than I should because I feel I am always swimming upstream. Perhaps my answer is less a how am I doing this and more of a, I really should be focused on this! I am, however, so incredibly grateful to so many people who continue to support and champion my work, which makes it easier to feel like it's accomplishing what I hope it will. Seeing those results makes it easier to take a breath here and there. I also try to think of my career not in a linear timescale, but rather something a bit more disconnected—that it will take longer, and maybe not in the ways I will get to see, for my work to achieve what I hope it will. I've begun understanding just how much the sacred is part of my work, and that demands a disconnection from the ways I used to measure my work (and how hypercritical I've been towards myself).
Find Daisy Patton on Instagram